When people try and say 'write like you speak' a lot of what they mean is get rid of nominalisations. It's especially important because a lot of people are actively trained to write like this, so when they try and write in 'public' they tend to do more of it.
I'm always on the look at for good/bad examples. These are a couple:
"In the 1970s, the poet Elizabeth Bishop taught writing seminars at Harvard. Shy and nervous leading classes, she still managed to produce a long, confident list for her students headed ‘If you want to write well avoid these words’. Many of the words were nominalizations, like creativity, sensitivity and ‘most ivity-words’. Others were those dressed-up noun categories that have crept into daily use and distance us from the real: life-experience, relationship, aspect, area, potential, structure, lifestyle."
From First You Write a Sentence, Joe Moran
For today’s poem, I gift to you this one about nouns conversioning to verbs. pic.twitter.com/TkpxwCf8TS
— Brian Bilston (@brian_bilston) October 16, 2022